


Memories Can't Wait

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - America, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Post-First War with Voldemort, Vigilantism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-26 15:55:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9910169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: The first one was difficult.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alivingpart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alivingpart/gifts).



The first one was difficult. He was probably fifty or sixty and had a few gold teeth and Sirius had seen him before on Diagon Alley in Ollivander’s or something on his nightly rounds back when rounds seemed to have meaning or significance. He kept trying to tell himself Marlene had died at the warehouse where this guy kept smuggled wands and potions supplies he sold to Death Eaters but it was hard to keep any imagination in his mind through all the begging and sobbing. Not far away on the flat backlit by the car headlights Remus was watching him with the cold blankness and slowly carefully without blinking he drew out a cigarette from the pack in the front pocket of his shirt. 

Sirius looked up toward the waxing moon and did it. They left the body on the desert and got in the car again. 

\--

Out back of a diner outside Tucumcari Sirius selectively transfigured particular giveaway elements of the car (its color, license plates, count of doors, length of trunk) whilst Remus spoke to his informant in the American Magical Congress on a two-way mirror. Though it was November the New Mexico high desert was warm but in the shade the fine hairs were standing up on Remus’s forearms. Possibly also he was cold because he was very thin (he had lost nine months and thirty pounds on assignment near Astrakhan), or he had a chill because of what his informant was telling him. They went inside for dinner and sat at a table in the setting sun through the wide high windows unspeaking as usual watching the trucks pull past on the highway and listening to the Go-Gos on the jukebox. 

“Where are we going now?” 

Remus had had four or five bites of his huevos rancheros and had pushed the plate away so as to prop up his scabby bony elbows on the table and press the heels of his hands into his eyes. At some juncture since they had last seen each other someone had tattooed a smudgy lunar circle on the back of his forearm. 

“Across the state,” Remus said. At first it had shocked Sirius how cold and old and empty his voice. Sharpened scraped against a stone. “White Signal.” 

The light spread yellow-gold across the table with the abstract chill of the oncoming night. 

“Want me to drive?” 

“I’ve got it.” 

The waitress brought Remus a cup of coffee to go and a styrofoam clamshell box for his eggs and salsa though Sirius knew he would not eat it. They had only been reunited four days previous on one of the secret wards in St. Mungo’s and as it had been then so was it still rather like making the acquaintance of a new person he had never so much as spoken to before nevermind a person he had lived with for a decade. A person whose every drafty soul-corner he had once known and a person whose mind he had once professed to be able to read on particular carnal occasions. Whose heart he had broken at least twice. Who had broken his heart at least once. The unending cyclical and tidal meditation of his subconscious if dreams were to be believed. And of course by process of elimination in the height of his wartime persecution and paranoia the most certain traitor. 

As soon as they got in the car he fell asleep but he woke again around midnight he thought when Remus pulled off the highway onto a washboarded gravel ranch road and the headlights cast a spell-like light questing into the darkness. Through its omnipresent static the radio was playing Squeeze’s “Tempted.” When Remus turned the car and the lights off they sat for a while unspeaking watching as the darkness developed out of the moon like a photograph, listening to the impossible swallowing silence. 

\--

A few days later he woke just after dawn on the floor of a synagogue basement in Las Cruces. It was the only facility of its like between Austin and Phoenix, and Remus had gotten the address from his informant at the AMC. The person who woke him was the cantor, a young and charitable witch whose name he didn’t remember, who lived next door in the rectory and personally facilitated much of the synagogue’s Muggle and magical good works, including a clean needle exchange and the cell for werewolf transformations. She had brought Sirius Mexican dinner and a beer the night before and now she brought him a steaming cup of coffee she had sweetened with condensed milk. 

“Your friend is up,” she said. “He’s getting dressed.” 

“Is he alright?” 

“Yeah, I’ve seen worse. Where are you guys going today?” 

She thought they were on vacation. “Alamogordo I think. He does the navigating.” 

“I was going to say you probably should drive. I gave him a Valium.” 

Remus came out in another few minutes. He was holding another cup of coffee supplied by the cantor and he looked a little woozy. His face was placid and bloodless and there was but a single bandage Sirius could see, spotting bright blood against white cotton on his forearm not far from where Sirius knew the circle tattoo was. 

They got in the car and drove across White Sands. “What’s wrong with me,” Remus said after a little while. 

“She gave you a Valium.” 

Evidently that wasn’t the answer. Remus watched around him at the drivers’ side window blearily through his sunglasses. North of them toward the top of the Jornada Del Muerto a door had been opened thirty-five years or so ago which had yet to be shut — which might never be shut. Sirius had been reading about it the night before in a tourist pamphlet he’d picked up in Las Cruces which had evidently been designed for the odd set of scientists or nihilists who wanted to tour key locations in the history of the H-bomb. 

Funny the things Muggles had had to come up with to evince total destruction, Sirius thought. Funny all the work they had had to do to shuck it out of the ground and split the atoms. He remembered once as a child he had found in his parents’ library a book entitled _Magical Defenses Against Nuclear Fallout_. 

They pulled over the car in the parking lot of White Sands National Monument and sat in the sun smoking cigarettes and after a little while Sirius went inside for a bag of chips and looked for a while around the gift shop with a sort of anthropological fascination. When he came back out Remus was talking to a young man in army fatigues who had pulled up beside their car in a camouflaged Jeep. 

\--

“These people are evil,” said the soldier. His accent was languorous and Southern. He looked back at Sirius and Remus in the rearview mirror. The wind through the Jeep’s open roof had caught in Sirius’s hair and the wide neck of Remus’s sweater. They had left the highway and the national monument for the military roads onto the base. “Most of us — I’ll have you know. Most of us are Muggle-born or half-blood and thus have never been happy with this Faustian arrangement. But it’s orders.” 

“Right.” 

“We’ve all had orders that didn’t sit right with us,” Remus said. The Valium hadn’t quite worn off and he sounded tired and sagely. 

“I’m certain most of the Muggle officers have been Imperius’d,” the soldier went on. “And most of the wizarding officers are — you know.” 

“Compromised.” 

“Exactly.” 

They didn’t speak for a minute. The radio tinnily played a selection of Vietnam-era psychedelia. “How many of them do you have?” Remus asked. 

“Six.” 

“ _Six_.” 

“They were promised amnesty by certain subsets of the American Magical Congress. But you probably know this. How many of them have you got so far?” 

“Seven.” 

“So this’ll make a round baker’s dozen.” 

“Unlucky thirteen more like.” 

“It’s one-quarter exactly,” Remus said. “There’s fifty-two thought to have come to the States.” 

The soldier was kneading the leather steering wheel ponderously. “Jesus,” he said. “And you two are supposed to — ” 

“Yes.” 

“Everyone left who’s still alive is in Siberia looking for the other seventy-three,” Remus told him. 

They drove across the shocking scar of whitewashed sand into the fine spreading desert-blue morning and at last came upon the bunker outside the missile range where the soldier said the Death Eaters were being housed. “Are you going to get court-martialed or whatever for this,” Sirius asked him when they got out of the Jeep. 

“I intend to tell them you Imperius’d me.” 

“Aren’t we in the clear then ‘cause it’s legal in America?” 

“Precisely.” 

They went inside together and did the deed with Fiendfyre. One of them was Rey Axley, the soldier told them later, who had killed Mary MacDonald in the crypt of the church in Eastleach in ’79. The soldier took them to a cantina in Alamogordo for lunch and beers and afterward brought them back to their car in the National Monument parking lot. Into the waning of the day Sirius drove Northeast through the reservation toward Roswell as Remus went through the dossier crossing out the names of the dead with a big black marker and an expression not so much of satisfaction but of expectance. 

\--

It wasn’t so much that Sirius had never killed Death Eaters before but he had never killed them at point-blank range looking at their bare faces and their civilian clothes and listening to all their bullshit. Remus evidently didn’t feel much about this anymore probably because of whatever had happened in Russia. 

It was getting easier day by day which made him nervous. And sometimes he thought (while he was driving and Remus was asleep in the passenger seat or doing his other more frightening thing where he stared at the window [not so much through it but just at it] hardly blinking with his face still as stone) that the ones they had come upon so far had surrendered to it gladly as a kind of river sweeping under. The way he sometimes thought he would surrender to death now if it came calling. 

They didn’t talk about much at all beyond the names in the dossier and whether to turn left or right on the wind-swept winter desert roads. Toward the end of November they were obliged to go to a Muggle thrift shop in Carlsbad for warmer clothes which mostly constituted novelty t-shirts and absurd sweaters and a cranberry-red knit hat for Remus who was still too malnourished for his hair to grow back right. Sometimes they pointed out to one another magical desert plants they recognized from herbology and in the vivid black night stared at the sky and tried to remember what they could of astronomy beyond the gloom and doom. What they could remember of anything beyond the gloom and doom. They went to Carlsbad Caverns on a Monday in the late morning and walked around in the darkness and the ranger showed them graffiti done by tourists in wagon grease at the beginning of that century. Then they went outside into the blinding-bright baptismal day and sat on the tailgate of the car eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And then — as ever — they drove to Hobbs to kill someone. 

\--

Sirius had asked Dumbledore, in St. Mungo’s on November 1, to adopt Harry. He did not know until late in 1982 that on the same day in the same place during his routine physical and psychological re-entry examination Remus had asked the same thing. These days he was beginning to understand why Dumbledore had said no. Most nights he laid awake staring up at the ceiling of the car or the tent or the shitty motel room watching at the moving shadow trying to close his eyes. He felt infected by vigilance and not sure it was rational. Remus talked in his sleep but it was rarely coherent. The moon moved upon the desert casting it in a pale cottony light and it was so silent at night he could hear coyotes howling echoing across the vast flat from miles and miles away. Above an ecstasy of stars abstract and cold as eyes. 

At first it had felt like an unholy slight and he’d fought tooth and fucking nail. The old man had put him in a full-body bind until he let up, exhausted, and then he wept on the floor for a while about any number of things. Subsequently he had resolved to prove himself in America so that perhaps when he returned home if he did so outside of a coffin he would be allowed visitation rights or something. 

He did not know yet he would be going with Remus and he did not know yet they would be going to extrajudicially execute Death Eaters who had sought asylum under certain provisions of certain subsets of the American Magical Congress in an assignment which theoretically could bring about a major international diplomatic incident the likes of which the wizarding world hadn’t seen since the War of Jenkins' Ear, and in whose actualization they could be killed or tortured or jailed. He did not know yet they had been chosen for this assignment particularly because of those war-bred traits that made them both completely ineligible to adopt a child. They had come of age in fucking hell, Sirius thought. Lying awake in the passenger seat of the car watching through the bug-smeared windshield at the stars and the desert. Sometimes he put the dog on but its simpler mind felt like a kind of comfort he did not deserve and which would only soften him. 

He didn’t sleep and the sleeplessness made him constantly suspicious. He didn’t believe love was real and there was a shadow around every bend and behind every corner down the road and behind his mind. He could eat more than Remus could but food didn’t really taste like anything. After the initial adjustment period he found killing undifficult and justified. And he understood if they survived this they would be in hiding for the rest of their lives. 

Certain things once gone would never grow back. He walked on the desert waiting for Remus to wake up. He hoped Harry would never know him. 

\--

After Hobbs they went to Texas. North toward the Oklahoma Panhandle into the heart itself of dust and darkness. Remus's informant at the AMC connected him with a cattle rancher near Muleshoe who said there were evildoings just North in a town called Bovina and offered to take them up there on his tractor under cover of darkness to attempt scrying or whatnot. There was an abandoned grain elevator there in which several members of the local wizarding community claimed to have seen lights at night. 

First off the rancher sat Sirius and Remus down for a hearty breakfast of eggs and bacon and drop biscuits at his dinner table amidst piles upon piles of paperwork and bills architected artistically. “Don’t get me wrong,” the rancher said, sitting down with them creakily in his rocking chair. He was long and lean and had the look of one of those Depression-era farmers gone bankrupt in the dustbowl which later they learned his parents had indeed been. “I voted for the Sanguicrats as any reasonable pure-blooded American wizard would do. As by golly ever damn witch and wizard in North Texas likely did pure-blood or not. But I sure as hell didn’t vote for the unlawful harboring of fugitive criminals from England.” 

They went that night to Bovina and killed the two Death Eaters who had camped in the grain elevator and then the rancher took them to a bar in Friona to celebrate. Around midnight a young witch cornered Sirius on the way to the toilet with what at first seemed sexual intent but then she told him she was teaching at the wizarding school in New Deal, outside of Lubbock, and that certain students were behaving in a way she thought suspicious. “Half my kids are pure blood and the other half are mixed or Muggle-born from immigrant families,” she explained in a whisper. She’d brought a joint and condescended to share it with Remus and Sirius it in the alleyway behind the bar crouching behind the dumpster against the scouring dust-sharp wind. “The strange-actin’ kids are from Sundown from a big old ranch family and I bet you know what I mean when I say old. Rumor mill had it their parents were big Sanguicrat donors.” 

“You don’t think they’re harboring some — ”

“I don’t like thinking of my kids around those, those killers.” 

Remus’s brow furrowed guiltily and he looked across the parking lot into the flat dusty darkness. We’re killers, Sirius thought. 

\--

In the morning, hungover, they followed the teacher to Lubbock and broke off East-Southeast onto the ranch roads toward Sundown. It was so incredibly flat it seemed like a film set or a nightmare. Most of the houses were one-story ranches or trailers propped on cinderblocks and all the trees were low scrubby pines or dead cottonwoods and the wastewater ditches were dry. The main road and all the residential side streets seemed to stretch on and on into infinity printing mirror mirages stretching and shifting in the bright winter warmth. 

This family lived outside of town in the liminal region where the industry seemed to shift from cattle ranching to oil drilling. The derricks patterned strange markings against the undeveloped scrubland and when Remus put the window down they could hear over the wind the gentle dipping birdlike sound of them moving. They drove past a processing plant after not so very long, sulfur-fragrant in the flat, then they turned up a ranch road and came upon the compound where the schoolteacher had said her students lived. 

They left the car on the road and Disillusioned it and walked in, wands up their sleeves. The light on the desert refracting off the whitish soil was so bright Remus raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun but the scouring wind was cold. There were no derricks in sight now but Sirius could hear them singing like a kind of tinnitus buzz or distant bells. 

There was a barn around the back of the property Sirius could feel the magic on. Remus signaled he would go around the back and Sirius had not entirely gotten through the door before he narrowly dodged a bolt of sparking green-orange light from inside. He got a shield up quickly and from behind the heavy door let off three spells indiscriminately into the hayloft. 

His heart was beating inside another world. There was a commotion around back and he tried to ignore it. He switched the shield silently to refract and when he took a step inside the barn the red shock of a stunner hit it and bounced back to strike the Death Eater who had cast it; he tumbled from the rafters into a haybale with a comical burst of dust. 

Sirius went to him and pulled the unfriendly staticky wand from his grasp and said, “ _Enervate._ ” 

It was a young man — a Slytherin who had been a seventh year when Sirius and Remus had been thirteen or fourteen. Sirius had forgotten his name. “Black,” he said, spitting blood in the dust. 

“Hello there.” 

“They said there was a blood traitor and a werewolf playing vigilante in New Mexico and I should’ve known it was you two faggots.” 

“Us two faggots have killed eighteen of your bosom pals.” 

The Death Eater wiped snot and blood from the bridge between his nose and upper lip with the back of his hand. He wore a set of fine and heavy silver rings. Most of all, Sirius had been thinking lately, it was strange to see their faces and realize all along there had been people under the heavy black cloaks. And the faces were so young and human and sometimes recognizable and usually they just looked tired.

“What happened to Lupin?” said the Death Eater. “Was it Greyback?” 

Sirius didn’t say anything. Remus always said, don’t let them talk, and this was probably why. 

“I thought so. He has a burned-over sort of look.” 

“Burned — ”

“Scorched earth, man.” He spat blood on the floor again thick and smudgy viscous and bright as a kiss. “But you’ve heard about — haven’t you? Plenty among us thought it a shame we had to tacitly cosign such — savage methods…” 

Sirius did it quickly with _sectumsempra_. Just a suggestion of a scribble across the white marble column of the throat. It was over dramatically but rapidly. He puked in a corner (mostly acid) then went outside. Remus was already waiting there in the barn’s geometric noonday shadow, smoking a cigarette. 

“Got two around back. You alright?” 

Sirius wiped his mouth and spat in the dust in useless attempt to clear the taste of bile. “Yeah.” 

They got back in the car and drove South again toward Midland through the oilfields and the dust and the nothing towns. Savage methods, Sirius was thinking. It was a shame we had to tacitly cosign such savage methods. After a while in silence Remus found a radio station which played Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” and when it was over he rewound it again and again with magic. He had missed it, Sirius thought with a shock. He had missed something as simple as music. This ain’t no party — this ain’t no disco — he watched Remus shield his eyes against the sun with a palm to his forehead when he changed lanes on the highway. But otherwise he gave little signal he felt anything about it at all. 

They stayed that night in a motel room just off Interstate 20 outside a town called Monahans. There was dust inside the windowsill and the room stank of cigarettes. Sirius took a bath and tried to get the blood out from under his fingernails and then they ate potato chips for dinner in their separate beds watching a cop show on the staticky television. 

\--

Sirius woke at dawn drooling onto the motel pillowcase to find Remus was sitting at the foot of the bed watching the TV news on mute. Beside him on the hideous duvet was a puke-orange Bakelite ashtray emblazoned with the motel’s name in peeling fools’-gold inlay, into which he had extinguished perhaps four cigarettes. The yellow-blue dawn came in through the Venetian blinds onto the violent stretched-over bare skin of his back which had always looked to Sirius like a broke artist’s ragged canvas tightly drawn over woodscraps. Most of the scars were old and pale and familiar in the thin light. Others were not. On the TV the newscaster’s face was pretty and staticky and then she introduced the weatherman. Remus sighed and stretched his neck and bent to press the heels of his hands into his eyes. So Sirius sat up, dry-mouthed and woozy with sleep, thinking absolutely nothing at all. The silence except for the ceiling fan above rotating mismatched and squeaking casting a strange shadow upon the water-stained stucco and the air smelled like dust. 

Outside there was nothing. There was nothing left. He reached for the shocking monadnock of bone at Remus’s shoulder and the skin was warm. Remus took a little surprised and nervous breath that sounded very loud in the quiet room and Sirius embraced him. The ashtray fell and upended upon the floor. 

They did not speak hardly at all. He pressed his face into Remus’s neck and kissed the warm soft unmarked place behind-beneath his ear where his pulse beat frantic as a trapped bird against the fragile skin. He traced each of Remus’s ribs and palmed over his hollow belly and he heard Remus’s breath unspool and loosen but when he slipped his fingers under the waistband of Remus’s underwear Remus said, “Stop.” 

So Sirius did. He could feel Remus’s heart beating and his breath in his spine and on TV the newscaster was talking about a Libyan hit squad allegedly sent to the US to assassinate Reagan. 

Remus said, “I can't.” But then he stopped. He took Sirius’s hand and kissed the palm of it. 

“You can’t what.” 

He was dreading the answer. And he felt struck with something when Remus stood up. His mouth was red and drawn into a tight line and his eyes were soul-bright and shocked. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked at the window. The dawn through the shades painted these soft stripes of color across his chest and stomach and Sirius pulled him close again by the hips and pressed his nose and mouth against the light-marks and the scars. Remus’s hand tangled in his hair where it was damp with sleep against the back of his neck. Absently he wondered if this was a dream. He pressed his ear to the button at the sculptural butterfly join of Remus’s ribs and listened. 

“I need to see your face,” Remus said finally. His hands were very gentle in Sirius’s hair callused and trembling a little and the fingernails ragged. Like to say, don’t think too hard about why. 

He turned the TV off (the static dissolved to a point) and lay in the bed and Sirius covered him and kissed him everywhere he would allow and at last his mouth which was warm and mint-sweet with toothpaste and yielding and when he pulled away to breathe Remus chased him, spine arching a little at the neck. The light moved in the window with the sun and they were quiet in the silence but for the trucks on the highway outside and the TV two rooms over and the squeaking ceiling fan and in the quietude Sirius listened for the precise pitch of Remus’s breath and his heartbeat like the vibration of a tuning fork, two fingers inside him, thumb at the pulse in his neck, listening, watching, the movement beyond his eyes, and the soft wordless motion of his lips, and the slatted gestural sun blinding in the bleach-white bed… 

“Come on,” Remus said, against his lips. Gently as though Sirius might cry. “It’s alright, come on, come on.” 

It didn’t last very long but it was good and at the end of it he wanted to kiss Remus for a while or hold him or something else they had once done to each other in whatever halcyon pre-nightmare but Remus got up and got in the shower. They had to check out by eleven, and anyway they were obliged to drive before noon to a town called Saragosa, where they had someone to kill. 

\--

These Texas towns were like paper cutouts unfolded into the scrub and the sky. Upon first driving into every one of them Sirius wondered if the apocalypse had happened and he and Remus didn’t know it yet. There was nothing but static on the radio. South of them as they came into Saragosa was a suggestion of mountains visible on the horizon grey-black as a bank of thunderclouds. Remus, studying the atlas, said they were named after the Confederate general from the American Civil War. 

They’d been given an address by Remus’s informant at the AMC. The trailer was on an unpaved back street beside a haunted-looking adobe church abandoned decades and pockmarked with skeet shot, even the whitewash seeming sunbleached. In the overgrown yard was parked a stable of antique cars and ATVs rusting into the tangled grass. Remus opened the gate in the barbed wire fence setting the _Beware of Dog_ sign clattering against the posts and Sirius followed. 

“This'll make twenty-two,” Remus said. “Lucky — ” 

The spell struck him and he crumpled almost artfully like a tower of cards. 

Sirius had a shield up before he even heard the sickening and hollow echoing sound, blood and crunch, Remus’s skull made when it hit something hard in the grass. Flash of light from a window ajar, through the torn screen. Sirius crouched and the spell went whizzing over his head like a firework. Burst behind him at the base of the wire fence. He split the shield and left half of it over Remus and advanced, keeping low. Spells shattered against it, fracturing in vivid watercolor. 

You could keep a shield up maybe two minutes under such an onslaught with full concentration. He climbed up onto the makeshift porch and with a handy spell forced his way through the door. There was so much paper and dust in the house caked in the orange shag carpet with years’ worth of owl shit and bad wine that it caught fire quickly. The Death Eater in the window conducted it back toward Sirius with a grandiose gesture of his wand and instead of pushing it back again Sirius raised his wand over the mounting tidal wave of the conflagration and Petrified him. Then he stepped outside onto the porch again and shut the door, patting out the embers in his flannel shirt, and he went down the path to Remus and lifted the shield. Blood was spiderwebbing over Remus’s cheek and forehead into the well at the corner of his eye like the cracks in a broken windshield and his mouth which just that morning Sirius had been kissing in the motel room was just open showing his old chipped tooth and that in falling he had bitten through his tongue. And after a heartbeatless and seemingly eternal second his shoulder rose and fell with his breath. 

\--

Remus stirred halfway down Route 17 just North of Fort Davis. In his periphery Sirius watched him lift his palm (gravel and blood in the heel of it) to the wound in his forehead. “He got you,” Sirius said gently. “I think with _confundus_.” 

“Oh.” 

“Alright?” 

“Dizzy. Where are we?” 

“Texas still. Driving South to Marfa.” Remus looked at the window. There was a strange print of his blood against the glass where his head had rested against it. “You hit your head when you fell,” Sirius told him. “I thought you were dead for a second.” 

Remus nodded. He was trying to clean the blood from the window with the side of his hand but mostly only succeeding in smudging it. The road was narrow and wound through the strange flattened hills around dead trees and grey-brown brush in the dells. They drove past camps and trailers set into the hills where Muggles came out from Austin or El Paso to hunt deer and aoudad and stare at the stars. And where very long ago Apache and outlaws had hidden in the slots and the valleys en route to Mexico. 

“I thought it was you,” Remus said at last, cutting silence. “For about twenty minutes.” 

“What?” 

“I thought it — you were their secret keeper.” 

They had not yet broached this. The unthinkable. He felt he kept it beyond a dam inside his mind that was made of paper and of course it was now that it had broken through. 

“It was the worst thing I’ve ever felt ever in my life and it wasn’t even real.” Remus pressed the palm of his hand mystifiedly against the place on his forehead that was bleeding. “It was like, first I felt like the atomic bomb or something. Like, this huge burning. Like the whole apocalypse was inside my body. But then it went away so I guess it was like — you’ve seen the videos of it, you know all the houses they built and everything blown apart and melting. And then the old man came and he told me the truth.” 

“What did you do then?” 

“I don’t know. I was shocked I ever believed it was you and I was shocked it was really — him. And I was shocked that you all thought it was me so much that — but I was shocked about so much so it didn’t really feel like anything.” 

“I felt — not dissimilar. When I thought it was you.” 

“You thought it was me for months.” Remus’s voice was sharp and venomous and Sirius found he had forgotten how it had been when it was like that. At some juncture in summer 1980 it had just dissolved, all his fight, and it had left behind it the sort of wiped-blank slate clean and flat and hollow grey. They didn’t fight much anymore after that but whatever they did do was worse. “And I was sleeping in your bed.” 

Sirius pulled the car over and spelled a little water into the cupholder by the gearshift. There was a rumpled t-shirt in the backseat belonging to one of them and he cleaned the blood from Remus’s forehead with it. The wound at his hairline was narrow but deep and took some time to close with magic. 

“Everything was falling apart,” he told Remus. “I’ve no excuse for it now.” 

“I bloody loved you more than breathing. And I loved James and Lily. And I loved the kid the most.” 

“Loved.” 

“Everything — there’s nothing left.” 

He didn’t remember the last time he had seen Remus cry. ’79? His mouth twitched and the strange light caught and tracked the fragile meniscus of liquid in the sleepless violet hollows under his eyes. 

“Why do you think this is so easy for me?” 

As though he hadn’t wondered. 

“In Russia, I started thinking, if I have to dissemble myself completely for the greater good I can do it. Because otherwise I’m just going to do it out of my own misery so I might as well do it for some cause. But then I couldn’t stop and now I don’t know — where everything’s gone. Where I left it. And so I think if it had really been you I could’ve kept surviving that way just burnt down inside. No one would’ve ever held me accountable for, for never going back to normal. But it wasn’t you, and you’re here, and you’re — ”

“I’m not normal.” 

“You fake it fucking convincingly.” 

“Can’t you tell it — you’re so possessed by your own suffering sometimes.” 

He had been thinking it for years and yet he hadn’t meant to say it. The silence was ear-ringingly loud and shocked like the silence after fireworks. Remus was watching him across the sharpness of it like a wounded animal gathering what remained of its strength. 

“Toward the end I did a raid in Margate,” Sirius told him. “September. There weren’t many of us by then, you know. So it was just Kingsley and me. It was this old church; you know how fond they were of desecrating Muggle churches. They’d gotten a tip and left minutes before but we split up to look for stragglers. And we didn’t find any of course but I did find — up in the balcony under the pews by the organ. A fucking, a Muggle kid, five years old maybe, dead. And there was just a clean hole punched through his body. Like burned through. Where his heart was. And he was still warm. But there was no blood.” 

He had never told anyone this before. He hadn’t told Kingsley and he hadn’t told Dumbledore. He had burned the tiny corpse to ashes with a spell and Vanished them and then he had gone outside and rendezvoused with Kingsley and they had Apparated together back to London where Sirius had spent all that night vomiting. The memory had haunted him of late for the obvious reasons and also because it seemed a tidy presagement of how he had been similarly too late on Halloween. The bodies were very different. The child’s face had been shocked and frightened and theirs had borne a kind of certainty and determination Sirius had uncannily and horribly recognized from happier occasions. From their fucking wedding and the birth of their child. 

“I don’t think you have nothing left,” Sirius told him, turning back to the highway. “You can’t. If I still have something. I don’t know what it is but it’s something.” 

\--

On the desert roads some dusks and dawns while Remus slept or stared in the passenger’s seat Sirius remembered the summer, ’78, they had taken his motorbike up the Scottish East coast on the A90 and stayed in bed and breakfasts and laid in bed in the moving grey light til noon unspeaking and he would run his knuckles up the tectonic buttons of Remus’s spine and watch out at the sea thinking, nothing can touch us and we’re never going to die. They took tours of the lighthouses with tourist couples in their 70s and sat together in the back corner tables of seedy pubs in the evening and then they went down to the beaches at midnight hammered and stripped naked and swam together. The sea violent and loud as an exorcism. Laid in the cold sand gasping for breath and wrestled until it turned into something else. 

In the mornings they left and went inland on the bike careful on the dew-wet roads and Remus would press his cheek against Sirius’s back, arms around him, and it felt like a kind of vulnerable and shocking surrender. They were going to take the coastal roads to Inverness to pick up the A9 but in Nairn received a message from Dumbledore summoning them back to London post-haste. They never made it to Duncansby Head. 

\--

“It was to make a golem,” Remus told him. In Marfa Sirius had set the tent up while Remus had walked up the street to the convenience store. He had come back with cigarettes and a six-pack of Shiner and a loaf of flat and disgusting American bread and a fluorescent orange wedge of cheddar cheese. “Why they took the heart. For a golem.” 

“For a what?” 

“It’s this — like a monster made of clay but you need a child’s heart for it. Greyback said any virgin’s heart would do in a pinch but some of them tried that and they ended up botched and we couldn’t use them to fight.” 

The oncoming night to the East was sharp black as charcoal in the low clouds and what light was left to the West was a violet golden across the grassland and the low scrub. 

“A child’s — Jesus.” 

“He had a dozen or so. They were huge and they weren’t very smart. I always thought they seemed sort of sad. But they would do whatever he told them because he brought them to life or whatnot.” 

Sirius opened another beer and the snap of the breaking aluminum seemed very loud. It was nearly silent on the desert but for the wind in the grass and scrub and the hollow bleach-white spines of the sotols. 

“They never had anything like that,” he told Remus. “Sometimes they had, they had horrible things, you know, toward the end, horrible machines and Inferi… but never a kind of monster made of clay.” 

“So you stopped them making it.” He looked at Sirius for a while with a flighty-seeming softness and Sirius didn’t breathe. Didn't dare. Then he said, “It’s going to rain.” 

“We’re in the desert.” 

“Yes. But it’s going to rain. Can’t you smell it?” 

Sirius took a long deep breath; it was heavy and pure in the air as incense. He could feel the change in the wind because it sent goosebumps up the back of his neck. 

“That smell,” Remus said, “it’s, all the plants and everything in the soil know it’s going to rain so they open up.” 

“That’s lovely.” 

“It’s just Muggle science.” 

They gathered up the beers and the cigarettes and got in the tent. Remus had already brought the dossier in from the car and they sat close together listening to the coming storm blowing and battering against the rainfly, seeking and counting in the strange light through the vinyl how much death was left to chase out in the West or anywhere. 

**Author's Note:**

> if you liked this story, please consider a donation to the [national immigrant justice center](http://www.immigrantjustice.org/) in honor of its patron, [alivingpart](http://alivingpart.tumblr.com/).  
> "memories can't wait" is also [one of my favorite talking heads songs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJu-IABeCws) which has always, like many talking heads songs released between 1977 and 1981, struck me as very r/s  
> i am casually considering this a kind of proof-of-concept "short" so perhaps there will be more of this AU eventually, one day. thank you so much to alivingpart for the inspiration!


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